In Tanzania, many people spend up to six hours a day collecting water that, often, is not safe to drink. Even though water pumps have been built across the country, many are now broken and no longer operational. Instead of building new water points, SNV Tanzania, WaterAid and six other international NGOs focused on repairing the existing ones. To see how many water points were actually operational, they developed a water mapping tool in 2007.

A handheld Global Positioning System (GPS) unit was used to record the precise location of all water points visited. Data collected is then linked to a database; it can be analysed and presented in charts, graphs, and maps that are easy to understand. After mapping 55 of the 132 districts, we found that 43% of the water points were no longer working, and that 25% of the water schemes had become non-functional within two years of installation.

According to Huong Le, a senior SNV WASH advisor, “Water point mapping has huge potential as an effective monitoring and management tool for planning and decision-making. It can really help us persuade the Government to focus more on maintenance and training instead of only investing in new infrastructure.” Watch the video on the water point mapping programme.

Following these positive experiences, the Tanzanian government has adopted water mapping as national policy.

With the benefits of water point mapping now clear in the rural areas, SNV is planning to roll out a similar system for urban areas. This could be even more useful as a tool for public accountability. Using Google free software and web hosting, water user groups will be able to report daily on issues such as service hours, illegal connections, water tariff, water leaks and water quality. Since Google maps provide good detail of most urban areas, it is an excellent visualisation tool.

In this way, the Ministry of Water will be able to monitor the impact of its large investments in the urban sub sector. It will also allow transparent tariff settings that reward good performance and highlight inefficiencies.